This lame and utterly boring series has yet to even reach the already low, low bar set in the mid-1990s regarding this topic by Time and Newsweek. Beyond the drippingly bathetic nature of the reporting throughout the series, there is never more than a sentence or two given over to the fact that there is a huge ideological debate occurring within critical mixed-race studies circles about just what mixed race is and is not, about whether or not supporting it requires belief in the fallacy of biological race, about how much it does or does not advance the cause of white supremacy (whether overtly and knowingly or not), and about the propriety of the disproportionate influence of white mothers of black/white children within the multiracial movement.

The only boundary being pushed by the "Race Remixed" series is the continued fencing off of any significant input (beyond that sentence or two acknowledged above) by scholars who are critical of multiracial identity. If this thoroughly unbalanced series wanted to actually provide real news, it would dare to investigate how multiraciality poses a danger to civil rights compliance monitoring, how multiraciality is assisting certain persons of Hispanic and Asian descent in their transition to "honorary whiteness" while persons of African descent remain barred from doing the same, and how the multiracial movement remains absolutely exclusionary in terms of setting itself apart from the nearly 40 million Afro-Americans of mixed descent in this country. If that thoroughly mixed population is not mixed race, then no one is.

‚ÄúI photograph myself to talk about how we navigate through the world and how others see us.‚ÄĚ

Genevieve Gaignard is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work focuses on photographic self-portraiture, sculpture, and installation to explore race, femininity, class, and their various intersections. The daughter of a black father and white mother, Gaignard‚Äôs youth was marked by a strong sense of invisibility. Was her family white enough to be white? Black enough to be black? Gaignard interrogates notions of ‚Äúpassing‚ÄĚ in an effort to address these questions…

The expression of social and cultural identities matter to people in a myriad of ways‚ÄĒseeing one‚Äôs self-reflected on campuses, in schools and communities matters (Gaetano, 2015; Laffer, 2017; P., Mindy, 2019). This fact is important to libraries of all types as we think about library collections, services and staff. We know from research and from phenomena all around us that when people see themselves positively reflected in film, books, social media, news, music, theater, that those cultural memory institutions grow in their perceived relevance and significance to their communities (Downing, 2009; Tillson, 2011).

Take as an example, Marley Dias‚Äô#1000blackgirlbooks movement. Marley was only ten years old when she launched her movement to donate books to girls of African descent that featured African American female protagonists because not one of her required school readings featured Black girls as main characters (Grassroots Community Foundation, 2019). The We Need More Diverse Books movement has raised awareness and in recent years the number of published diverse books has increased substantially. 28% of the children‚Äôs books published in 2018 had main characters who were Asian American, Black, Latinx, and American Indian/First Nation yet only 50% of the children‚Äôs books about African Americans are written by people of that background (Cooperative Children‚Äôs Book Center, 2019). The numbers for mixed race identities in children‚Äôs books are not tracked but they are presumably an even smaller percentage…

The Forum Council did not oversell its claim. The Du Bois-Stoddard debate turned out to be a singular event, as important in its way as Lincoln-Douglas or Kennedy-Nixon. The reason more people don‚Äôt know about it may be its asymmetry. The other historic matchups featured rivals who disagreed politically but wouldn‚Äôt have disputed their opponent‚Äôs right to exist. [Lothrop] Stoddard had written that ‚Äúmulattoes‚ÄĚ like [W. E. B.] Du Bois, who could not accept their inferior status, were the chief cause of racial unrest in the United States, and he looked forward to their dying out.

As we mourned, I thought about white supremacy‚Äôs role in this shooting. I thought about the painful irony that white supremacy originates in Portugal and Spain, the lands from which the ancestors of most Latinos/as and its subsets‚ÄĒincluding Chicanas/os and Tejanos/as‚ÄĒhail. This includes my ancestors. I am, after all, a Cartagena.

Yet despite our origins, Latinos/as are not deemed true whites. We are a racialized other; even the lightest of us who pass or receive the status of honorary white know this comes at a price and is liable to be lost the moment someone suspects we‚Äôve broken the norms of white solidarity. How did this happen? How did the Iberian Peninsula‚Äôs Latina/o children lose the status of white? Let me sketch an answer for you…

‚ÄúHope‚ÄĚ and ‚Äúchange‚ÄĚ were the keywords of President Barack Obama‚Äôs 2008 campaign, and in his farewell address on January 10, 2017, he cited the evidence that he‚Äôd delivered‚ÄĒfrom reversing the Great Recession, rebooting the auto industry, and unleashing the longest stretch of job creation in the nation‚Äôs history to winning marriage equality and securing the right to health insurance for another 20 million citizens. At the same time, and with a view to the country‚Äôs divisive polarization, he made a plea for ‚Äúthe decency of our people‚ÄĚ and ‚Äúthe sense of common purpose that we so badly need right now.‚ÄĚ

In hindsight, it is increasingly possible to understand whether and how Obama‚Äôs legacy matched his rhetoric as well as to evaluate from various angles what his presidency accomplished and what this has meant for US politics, public policy, and civic life going forward. In The Obama Legacy some of the leading observers and scholars of US politics take up this challenge. In twelve essays these writers examine Obama‚Äôs choices, operating style, and opportunities taken and missed as well as the institutional and political constraints on the president‚Äôs policy agenda. What were Obama‚Äôs personal characteristics as a leader? What were the policy aspirations, output, and strategy of his presidency? What was his role as a political and public leader to the various constituencies needed to generate presidential power? And how did his presidency interact with other political forces?

Addressing these questions and others, the authors analyze Obama‚Äôs preferences, tactics, successes, and shortcomings with an eye toward balancing the personal and institutional factors that underlie each‚ÄĒall the while considering how resilient or fragile Obama‚Äôs legacy will be in the face of the Trump administration‚Äôs eager efforts to dismantle it.

In October of 2014, news outlets began reporting on a case of a lesbian couple suing a sperm bank for receiving the wrong donor‚Äôs sperm. As the lawsuit Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank alleged, not only did the couple receive the wrong donor‚Äôs sperm, but they had specifically chosen a white donor with blonde hair and blue eyes and the sperm they received had been from a black donor. Both women were white. The couple gave birth to a black/mixed-race child in 2012 and claimed that their daughter‚Äôs race posed particular challenges for their family, from facing prejudice in their nearly all-white community to difficulties dealing with their daughter‚Äôs hair. The couple sued for ‚Äúwrongful birth‚ÄĚ and ‚Äúbreach of warranty,‚ÄĚ citing emotional and economic difficulties.

Clearly, there are legal issues at stake‚ÄĒthe particular sperm bank was negligent in their handling of the transaction. But the claim of ‚Äėwrongful birth‚Äô brings up myriad sociopolitical and ethical concerns as well. Effectively, the plaintiff was alleging that her daughter‚Äôs blackness generated emotional suffering and economic burdens for Cramblett, and moreover, that she should be compensated for ‚Äėdamages‚Äô.

Unsurprisingly, many commentators reacted with outrage, disbelief, and dismay‚ÄĒoutrage that a mother would sue on account of having a non-white, but healthy child, disbelief that this claim could even be legally articulable, and dismay at the fact that one day this child would learn that her mother implicitly claimed that she should have never been born because she was black/mixed race.

While obviously problematic (the case was thrown out by an Illinois Circuit Court Judge in 2015), the fact that this case was legally and thus on some level, socially and culturally intelligible, sets the stage for an array of philosophical interventions. For my purposes here, I‚Äôll focus primarily on the problems and possibilities of various conceptualizations of race and disability that are illuminated by a politically-aware and historically-situated reading of Cramblett…